Postcards From Catatonia

By Abel Ashes (All rights reserved)

Dead sunflowers down the barbed wire hill like gray hairs with black dingle berries
A blonde haired dead grass forest where mice and pheasants hide from predators
And the little valley with the little houses and the little people
Surrounded by trees that all look the same dark collard shade of green
As we enter this drywall jungle we proceed to a strip mall store front stripped naked as a dancing girl, but as messy as galoshes full of goulash
Paper masks peppered with gypsum dust hang from big busted sewer pipes covered with rust.
Smog on the horizon looks like a dust storm over the ocean.
And time is not an element.
Time is just a measurement.
The clouds are white finger paint on a blue backlit diorama.
In the driveways below rest petrol pushers decorated in bumper stickers reading “God Bless America”, “One Nation Under God”, and perhaps most inexplicable of all “Power of Pride”
Are the little people inside unaware that democratic theocracy is an oxymoron sort of like authentic spirituality?
Behind the stucco walls the little people are eating rubber chickens raised in concentration coops.
While neighbors wet their whistles to the sounds of sore thumb music even here in catatonia.